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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#521

Post by BrendanEich »

bscphil wrote: post #496
BrendanEich wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read more carefully: 1. The increase was in 2017, reported per IRS regs in Mozilla Foundation's Form 990 filing (which must list all comp to board members even if they work for the for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary). 2. The "one guy" is Mitchell Baker, and she is chair of both foundation and corporation boards. But nice try attempting to pin blame on market share slide these last almost six years on me.

In your Twitter thread you claimed it was a "chart for top job" at Mozilla. Will you now say that was false, that Baker was not the highest paid employee for the duration of that chart?

Also you didn't acknowledge your 2016 blunder, or retract your scurrilous insinuation that I'm to blame lo these past almost six years for continued and even accelerating decline, not to mention loss of FirefoxOS to KaiOSTech. Please do better, or save it.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#522

Post by samantohermes »

joecool1029 wrote: post #428
pmichaud wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not offended by that obit. I can see she was going for a "speaker for dead" thing. I know that sort of direct honesty is out of fashion, but that's the kind of obit I want.

> I am not offended by that obit. Let me break this down for you. This isn't about you and an obituary or eulogy isn't something written to the dead: It's written to their family, their coworkers and friends, and for those who may have never really known the deceased. No leader should write in such a way that would insult the families of the dead and their belief systems. Reminder: This is a non-family relative of th…

No need for you to be rude either. Many people are on the autism spectrum, so it's not necessarily due to bad faith.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#523

Post by alexhutcheson »

roca wrote: post #333
zelly wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is good at everything except making browsers. rr is the best debugger I've used. I wonder if there's a way for them to monetize Rust. It seems impossible to monetize a programming language without owning a platform e.g. Microsoft (*.NET), Apple (Swift), Borland (Delphi), JetBrains (Kotlin). FirefoxOS for mobile with Rust as the first-class citizen would have been huge for them. Maybe it's not too late. Take n…

Hi, I'm the architect of rr. Mozilla is very good at making browsers. Making browsers is incredibly hard and it's amazing that Firefox is competitive with Chrome given a fraction of the development resources Chrome has. Mozilla has made some big mistakes, but so have the other browser vendors. It's easier to brush over your mistakes when you have an ocean of resources and market power.

Thanks for rr - it's such an amazing tool, and a really impressive engineering accomplishment.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#524

Post by andreasgal »

sstangl wrote: post #376

I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case. I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible fut…

Shoot me an email agal at apple. Also feel free to give my email to anyone else affected.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#525

Post by [deleted] »

catalogia wrote: post #312
phonon wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did. https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...

That's appalling. How did that make people still working at Mozilla feel? I can't imagine working under somebody like that.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#526

Post by bduerst »

manfredo wrote: post #494
bduerst wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appeal to legality isn't proof of moral superiority. Racial segregation was also legal via Jim Crow laws, and people still hold the political opinion it should still be despite society changing and moving forward. It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions.

> It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions. It is in California: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...

Only in enacting company-wide policies to coerce political participation. Terminating employment for political actions in an at-will employment state like California is still legal.

From your article:

>On the contrary, political beliefs or views are not a specifically protected category under California's discrimination laws. Nothing in either of the two labor code provisions above directly addresses discrimination or retaliation on the basis of expressed political views. Nor does the First Amendment serve to provide any further guidance. With limited exceptions, the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of "freedom of speech" applies only to government action and not private employers/employees. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 prohibits political affiliation discrimination against federal employees only.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#527

Post by 9152ba83773b »

catalogia wrote: post #506
9152ba83773b wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gerv's behavior would have led to him being fired a long time ago in any other company. He was a toxic employee. MoCo did him and his family a favor to keep him on the payroll until his death.

It would have been better to fire him when he was alive than to criticize him after he was dead. The former would have been productive, while the later is just distasteful.

I don't disagree they should have done that. I guess they didn't want to look like the bad guys that are firing a dying man.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#528

Post by pier25 »

somishere wrote: post #363
pier25 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition. For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS. It also misses important features such as multil…

@pier25 Would honestly disagree on your 'polish' concerns. I consciously 'returned' to Firefox macOS a little over a year ago from a contented experience with Chrome, for entirely non-practical reasons (it just felt like a good idea). And it's been nothing but pleasant. I'm a massive fan of the UI, it's simplicity, flexibility, but also its bold sense of self. I despise the too-polished feel of safari. It is impracti…

> Sure there may be edge-case usability issues on FF, such as your multi-lingual spell check, but this seems like an entirely workable extension challenge

It's an issue that affects anyone that writes in multiple languages. This accounts for the majority of internet users in the world since they write at least in their own language and English. This is not an edge case that affects 10% of users.

Like I already explained, it can't be solved properly with an extension. The ones that try to solve it slow down FF. This has to be solved at the native level, not in JS.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#529

Post by manfredo »

bduerst wrote: post #526
manfredo wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions. It is in California: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...

Only in enacting company-wide policies to coerce political participation. Terminating employment for political actions in an at-will employment state like California is still legal. From your article: >On the contrary, political beliefs or views are not a specifically protected category under California's discrimination laws. Nothing in either of the two labor code provisions above directly addresses discrimination o…

How is policy of terminating employees who donate to certain ballot propositions not amount to coercing political participation? It's directly coercing employees against donating with the threat of losing their jobs.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#530

Post by [deleted] »

athms wrote: post #433
shawndrost wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profit…

>She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and w…

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